Maja Ruznic “Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak” Contemporary Fine Arts / Basel |

As I arrive in Basel’s outdated city, on my method to Maja Ruznic’s solo exhibition “Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak” at Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery, I’m stopped by an surprising sight: some thirty-odd males, younger and outdated, wearing full conventional Alpine apparel, seated at a protracted desk outdoors a restaurant, every dealing with a pint of beer, singing softly collectively. The heatwave at present pushing town to document highs makes me momentarily query what I’m seeing. Each man delicately slips between chest and head voice as arpeggios dissolved into each other, by no means fairly starting, by no means fairly ending. It was much less like a gaggle chanting than mild refracting via shifting water. Pulled out of my harmony-induced trance, I understand I’ve stumbled upon the thirty second Jodlerfest, the Swiss pageant that brings hundreds of yodelers, alphorn blowers and flag throwers into town’s winding streets — an occasion Basel hasn’t hosted since 1924. 

Upon reaching my vacation spot, ten medium-to-small oil work, freshly made by Ruznic, await me. Most of the figures are rendered via what looks like an deliberately meandering brush, shapes superimposed with an improvisational perspective that leaves the canvas at as soon as flat and compressed. Human and animal-like kinds trace at one another fairly than resolve, bleeding collectively as an alternative of standing aside, slipping endlessly between background and foreground. The impact is heightened by skinny paint utilized in tough, blotchy, repetitive strokes. Brushwork that means stressed motion whereas letting the richly saturated pigment present via in layers with an depth no replica can actually seize. 

With extra yodeling drifting in from outdoors, I discover myself circling an outdated artists’ reckoning: music appears to own an ancestral capability to maneuver us extra instantly than the visible arts, particularly in kinds that don’t lean on the technological polish our eyes and ears now count on. In the infinite contest amongst media for sensual superiority, we demand much more of portray than we do of music, which seems to render the cavernous depths of feeling with an virtually easy precision, whereas visible artwork, nonetheless achieved, appears ceaselessly to fall simply wanting that immediacy. We don’t really feel we’re “reading” music the best way we really feel we’re studying a portray — although music’s directness is arguably no extra innate than portray’s (being a set of conventions and listening habits absorbed so fully they now cross for nature). If music’s benefit is that it doesn’t signify, then painters chasing that very same immediacy have traditionally stripped illustration away too — abstraction because the visible arts’ reply to the identical ache, typically constructed inside philosophical programs that gave artists coloration theories, geometries, and cosmologies to work from. 

Ruznic’s personal route is psychological, nearer to séance than to doctrine. Her figures floor unbidden, three-quarters fashioned, arriving from a childhood in wartime Bosnia spoken of obliquely, filtered via a long-standing curiosity in Jungian evaluation and the concept portray can perform as a form of energetic creativeness, a spot the place the unconscious is allowed to attract itself.

There’s no cosmology behind these canvases, no fastened vocabulary of coloration or geometry to decode; as an alternative there is a belief within the hand’s personal drift, in staining and wiping and remodeling till a face (or the ghost of 1) appears to reach by itself phrases. Perhaps that’s why the work resists settling into both illustration or abstraction: it isn’t chasing music’s directness via a system, however via one thing extra like listening — ready for a picture the best way one may look ahead to a melody to resolve, realizing it may not. Like the yodeling outdoors nonetheless refusing to fairly start or finish, Ruznic’s figures are doing a lot the identical in paint: hovering within the half-sung, half-said.